Bill Maher

The monologue

Choose Well

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

--Octavia Butler, Parable Of The Talents

Today's Tweet

what she said pic.twitter.com/OKb8iir9Ff

— Rev. Atheist Girl 🦄 (@iamAtheistGirl) June 30, 2017

Michelle's Variation

"The presidency doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are" —@MichelleObama@realDonaldTrump...We know who you are pic.twitter.com/mSuizM8veY

— Rantt (@RanttNews) June 29, 2017

45* told us who he is. 

And it really doesn't bother me so much that 62 million of us bought the bullshit about how he was just being a showman, and he'd pivot to common decency once he's in office.  What grates on my soul is thinking there's a core group of about 20 million who see him pretty much exactly for the bag of sludge that he is, and either they don't care or they actually want a president to act like that.

It could always get worse - don't put anything past this bunch - but it's possible we could be seeing the emergence of the endgame for this tribal crap of Blue Team vs Red Team - my team forever no matter what.

Politics on "the right" has degenerated to where there's no policy argument anymore. There's no real discussion about the relative merits of one approach to dealing with our problems versus another. Too many "conservatives" are thinking the whole point of the exercise is to make statements that are simply intended to get "a Libtard mad enough to cry.

Cruise a few comments sections with that in mind and score it out.

A Grand Idea

Overheard on YouTube:

I can't imagine how it hasn't occurred to someone in the White House at some point in the last 4 months, but wouldn't it be great if they slipped a letter of resignation into one of those Executive Order folders? He'd sign it blindly - like he does everything else - and boom; new president.

But then, President Pence. So yeah - we're fucked.

Today's Tweet

TRUMPSTERS If you can read, check this out... pic.twitter.com/kBe5HITY77

— Wes Coates (@2splibb) June 29, 2017

Today's Pix

Take A Break And Stay At It

Chuck Wendig, terribleminds.com

My fave is #5.

These are dumb times and dumb times often call for tireless marathons of beer and donuts and naps — and definitely do those things from time to time! — but also, like, eat some fucking vegetables, get some exercise, get some rest. Trust me, I get it, pretty much every day I hit a period where I’m like, “The best thing I can do right now would be to drink whiskey until I stop recognizing the world,”

Pro-Life = Dead Women

Criminalizing abortion doesn't stop abortion - it just makes it more dangerous.

Jennifer Wright, Harper's Bazaar

The Trump administration may be the most fervently anti-abortion since Reagan.

This will likely come as a surprise to every man who, prior to Trump’s election, assured me, “don’t worry, he’s really a democrat! He’s not going to do anything about abortion!”

It seems you guys were wrong.

Trump has reinstated the global gag rule, preventing funding for overseas reproductive health organizations that offer abortion related services. Closer to home, Trump signed a bill on April 13 that allows states to cut off funding from organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions. He has suggested that federal funding could continue to go to the women’s health organization only if they stopped performing abortions.

All of this falls under the banner of a “pro-life” agenda.

Indeed, Vice President Mike Pence and counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, both spoke enthusiastically at the March for Life. There, the Vice President proclaimed, “We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America.”

Perhaps when people enact these laws, they imagine what a world with more restrictive abortion rights—or a “culture of life”—looks like. I do not think these people are evil. I suspect they have a vision of a world that is flawed. I think when they imagine that world of outlawed abortions, they imagine a world full of adorable, bouncing babies. They imagine happy mothers, and fathers who are, unexpectedly, delighted and doting fathers.

That is not reality.

The impulse to restrict a woman's access to the full range of health services (including abortion) is dumb for a mess of good reasons - not the least of which is that the decision to have kids or not to have kids belongs to whoever gets pregnant.

If you prefer the clear-eyed pragmatic approach, then another reason is plain old ordinary economics. It's cheaper and way more cost-effective to prevent the problems caused by unwanted pregnancies. And going with workable measures that actually lower the need for abortion is way better than the bullshit law-n-order "solutions" either in place now, or being proposed to remedy those problems.

BTW - "workable" and "abstinence only" are incompatible. Remember - total abstinence wasn't 100% effective even for god.

Allow me to reiterate the basics on this:

• Eggs ain't chickens
• Caterpillars ain't butterflies
• Ain't nuthin' goin' on in my daughter's uterus that's any of your fuckin' business
• So fuck the fuck off, you pinch-faced blue-nosed puritanical fuck

John Oliver Redux

I'm a recovering Radical Randite. It took me a long time to get past that shit, because (I tho't) it was working for me. It wasn't. It doesn't. It can't because it's a contradiction - and just like Ms Rand always said: Contradictions exist, but they can't prevail.

Samantha

Today's Bamboozle

45* knows he can feed dis-information to the rubes directly, so most of them won't ever hear anything that runs counter to what he needs them to hear - what they already believe anyway - which is what he continues to reinforce, and why he's working so hard trying to freeze out traditional corporate media.

Vox:

What you’re looking at is a massive cut in Medicaid spending. In 2026, the Better Care Reconciliation Act would cut Medicaid spending by about $160 billion, and end Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income Americans.

As my colleague Sarah Kliff writes:

The Senate bill begins to phase out the Medicaid expansion in 2021 — and cuts the rest of the program’s budget too. The Senate bill would end the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to millions of low-income Americans. This program has provided coverage to more Americans than the private marketplaces

It would also cut the rest of the public insurance program. Better Care would also limit government spending on the rest of the Medicaid program, giving states a set amount to spend per person rather than the insurance program’s currently open-ended funding commitment.

Ultimately, the Congressional Budget Office projects 15 million people would lose coverage with the repeal of Medicaid expansion.

So it’s incredibly misleading for the president to claim that Senate Republicans are increasing funding for Medicaid.

This is pretty typical of the Faux Conservative crapola they've been peddling for a long time. It's a variation on one of their favorite themes - "tax revenue goes up when tax rates come down".  So it follows that the rubes will internalize this new crapola and adopt it as part of their catechism - "cutting Medicaid funding now increases Medicaid spending in the long term."

Yeah, OK. And the best way to fill a bath tub is to open the drain and turn one of the faucets off.

A smiling hyena will still eat your children

These people have no soul and no honor.

Today's Winner

From HuffPo, this one wins the internet for today:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
--and--

There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.

...establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...

How does "I'm good, fuck y'all" fit with the basics of our founding document?

Strike A Blow For Freedom

So there was a little cleanup necessary in Little Rock...

Capitol crews sweep up remnants of the shattered 10 Commandments monument #ARnews #arpx pic.twitter.com/97D4om0ER0

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) June 28, 2017

...because

WATCH: Facebook video appear to show man running over Ten Commandments monument on Capitol grounds #ARNews #arpx #arleg pic.twitter.com/W8Rp2qinuZ

— Austin Kellerman (@AustinKellerman) June 28, 2017

Charlie Gets It

On AHCA, Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

If you put credence into the notion that the Senate bill has an upside because of its effect on The Deficit, hire someone to cut your meat for you for the rest of your life. Try to keep in mind the Blog's First Law of Economics: Fck the deficit. People got no jobs, people got no money.

There isn't a single promise that the president* made on this issue during the campaign that this new tax-cut law doesn't smash to smithereens. The CBO says this bill will knock 15 million people off their insurance next year. That's horrendous. The whole bill is about allowing Medicaid to die on the vine. The CBO says that the Medicaid cut that all those Republicans say is imaginary will top out at $772 billion.